Anne Phillips and the Curious Case of Miss Phillips' Conglomerate
It's the Yorkshire Fossil Festival in Scarborough Sept 12-14, and so what better time to talk about one of Yorkshire's own #trowelblazers…?
As Nina Morgan says, it may be fanciful to imagine this is an image of Anne Phillips (in Black) and her brother John (in white) exploring the Malvern Hills. It could equally be John and Adam Sedgwick who were surveying there together. But we like to think it could be her. And if it isn't, well… we know where Anne is: out of view, uncovering the conglomerate that bears her name and which settled a geological debate once and for all!
Anne Phillips is a mystery. What we know of her comes second hand, deduced from snippets written to her, or about her. Nuggets of information, rolled smooth by the tide of history, and redeposited in the archives of her more famous brother and uncle. But sometimes this is enough to solve a mystery. What we do know is this: it was Anne Phillips' work that finally resolved the origins of Britain's Malvern Hills, proving Sir Roderick Murchison wrong in the process.
Anne Phillips (1803-1862) was the niece and ward of William Smith, the man who published the first geological map of Britain. But Anne's story is really told through the marginalia of the life of her brother John Phillips. John is less well-known than his uncle, but was arguably an even more important figure, rising from a position as his uncle's orphaned apprentice to become a professor at Oxford. For most of his career, Anne was his housekeeper, confident and constant companion but it wasn't until geologist and science writer Nina Morgan set to work transcribing John Phillips' letters that the true extent of Anne's contribution to her brothers work came to light.
Her importance is absolutely clear, and John is unstinting in his adoration for Anne:
“Whatever I possess is as much yours as mine, for without you I should not have won it.”--John Phillips, 1838 (quoted in Morgan 2007)
Anne's most notable geological achievement was proving the husband of Charlotte Murchison, Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, wrong about the origins of the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. Murchison, a man rarely short of opinions that later turned out to be erroneous, argued that the igneous rocks of the main Malvern ridge were younger than the Silurian sediments thereabouts, having formed and then forced their way up and through those sediments at a later date. Sir Roderick, with significant input from Charlotte--see here, had published the then definitive volume on that geological period, The Silurian System, and he was a force to be reckoned with -- but John had other ideas. John thought the igneous rock of the Malverns had formed first, and that the Silurian sediments were lain down by an ancient sea that lapped against Malvern's igneous shores.
It took Anne to prove that this was in fact the case. READ MORE on trowelblazers.com